My talk is concerned with my ongoing work as a scholar/curator and technologist on the notion of the augmented museum. The phrase "augmented museum" refers to three complementary developments:

--a digital era re-imagining of the traditional bricks-and-mortar museum that explores the possibilities of linking interior exhibition spaces to the exterior environment either via innovative partnerships between institutions or the curation of public spaces as an extended feature of museum-based exhibitions
--new approaches to the display of physical collections that allow for enhanced access, interactivity, and interaction with the scholarly community
--experimentation with "bottom up" participatory models of museum-based education as a complement to traditional "top down" approaches

My talk will map the overall contours of the augmented museum and look at a concrete experiment: The Tunnels, a 7000 square meter installation in Trento, Italy, where an abandoned industrial site has been repurposed as an experimental history museum with an island in Second Life serving as a support and learning space.

About Jeffrey

Jeffrey Schnapp is a Fellow at the Berkman Center and occupies the Pierotti Chair in Italian and Comparative Literature at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000 with the aim of creating a transdisciplinary platform devoted to testing out future scenarios for the arts and humanities in a post-print world.

SHL is a hybrid institution, a kind of Media/Tech Lab wedded to a Humanities & Arts research center, devoted to thinking outside of the box, to experimenting with public forms of scholarship and culture, to exploring the interstices between research and art practice, to developing models and tools for collaboration and teamwork, and to providing the opportunity for students at all levels to learn through making and doing.

His current research interests lie in the domain of mixed reality approaches to scholarship, curatorship, and cultural programming and in a broad range of challenges placed under the general banner of "animating the archive." During the course of the 2009-2010 academic year, with support from the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation, and with museum partners on both sides of the Atlantic, Jeffrey's research group is launching a new open source virtual world entitled Sirikata.